Entrepreneur’s tallest ambition
Print Edition
A CHINESE multi-millionaire who built himself an Egyptian pyramid and a replica of Versailles vows to construct the world’s tallest building by the end of the year — despite authorities preventing work amid safety concerns.
Zhang Yue is worth an estimated 1.1 billion yuan (US$182 million) and has grandiose aspirations, the biggest of them to build an 838-meter tower he calls “Sky City.”
It is designed to be 10 meters higher than the current title-holder, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai (828 meters) — which took five years to construct.
But he admits the project has run into fierce opposition. “There are not many people who support us,” Zhang said. “There are too many bad people.”
Zhang, 53, made a fortune selling air-conditioners and was the first Chinese entrepreneur to own a private helicopter, but has sought to reinvent himself as a green crusader.
He retains a down-to-earth manner, eating in the staff canteen and spitting casually into a tissue as he talks, but sees himself as a visionary hoping to reshape China’s cities.
The decades-long movement of hundreds of millions of people from countryside to town is the largest migration in human history, and both a cause and effect of its economic boom, but he sees it as a road to environmental disaster.
“We have to quickly move out of this mistaken kind of urbanization,” he said, describing Sky City, with energy-saving materials and reduced use of land, as “one such way out.”
Zhang’s Broad Sustainable Building company has already built a 30-story hotel in 15 days in the central Chinese city of Changsha.
A time-lapse video of the construction has been viewed more than 5 million times on YouTube and shows the concrete and metal sections being slotted into place and bolted together, akin to a gigantic Lego set.
“Our aim is not making money,” he said, lounging in bare feet on the hotel’s top floor, as thick grey smog — an increasingly common sight in Chinese cities — blurred his view of surrounding fields.
“Once you have environmental consciousness, money loses meaning.”
A short man who appears to have difficulty staying still, Zhang sipped from a giant cylinder of tea as a chauffeur drove him past the 40-meter-high pyramid he built on his corporate campus.
Opposite it stands a replica of France’s Palace of Versailles, designed by his wife, which Zhang plans to turn into an “environmental philosophy academy,” although for now it hosts a display of North Korean paintings.
Close to Zhang’s office, workers in a cavernous hangar are making pre-fabricated building sections, and he insists there will be “no problems” using the method to build Sky City.
“We will be finished by December,” he said. “I could make an even taller building.”
Construction was launched last year, but rapidly suspended and media reported authorities in Changsha had ordered a halt as it lacked proper permits.
An audience “laughed” when Zhang’s plans were first presented at a meeting of the US-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, said David Scott, a structural director at engineering firm Laing O’Rourke.
But now “people understand it’s a much more serious offer,” he said. “I wouldn’t say it’s not feasible ... Properly thought through, it will work.”
In the hotel, Zhang — who studied art and first worked as an interior decorator — brandished one of his firm’s egg-shaped smartphones, which can gauge levels of tiny air pollutants known as PM2.5. It was an attempt to demonstrate his building’s immaculate air quality — although the demonstration was rendered more difficult by the cigarette he had just smoked.
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